lllill' .,' ) JlLl J , 1 ) J..J-:- -- J J) l.i.:, ",::.. '. ',. ' I ! .i', -f.W (r ' J twJiLÜ I L f .......... t ....=... {t /" I -= (, ;;';1 ..,h, , ( ....... - 4_ , "": '3 .... '. . L tM 0 f'v 1\ D C IN C J I/' ì"> ,.'!'t: ." ': '"':,' , '. oCi:'..,..... ,:;,,;.,j . the death of a family friend in the World Trade Center attack. He planned to reënlist; last Christmas, he started fill- ing out the forms to become a helicop- ter pilot. On January 2,2004, the 3rd Platoon roused earl It was a Frida the Muslim Sabbath, a day when clerics in Mini- Vietnam were known to preach mis- chiet The 3rd Platoon was to take two Humvees and drive down River Road to patrol the Salah al-Din mosque, or Ce- line Dion mosque, as the soldiers called it. Farther down River Road, at the south- east comer of Bravo Company's district, lay the Tobah mosque, which was thought to be Wahhabi-influenced and deserving of special attention. Of the company's seven Humvees, two were "up armored" -plated heavily enough to deflect rifle fire-and the 3rd Platoon was given both for this mission. The pla- toon's leader, First Lieutenant Andrew Blickhahn, a balding twenty-six-year- old two years out of West Point, took the shotgun seat of the lead Humvee, the post responsible for spotting any mines in the road. Seiden started to get in be- side him, but at the last moment, for reasons nobody remembers, he switched places WIth Sweetness. Seiden walked back to the second Humvee and took 78 THE NEW YOR.KER, AUGUST 9 & 16, 2004 r r.. Sh n h vJ . the shotgun seat. Bang slipped into the seat behind him, in the gunner's hatch. The two Humvees left the refinery compound at about 11 A.M. and headed down a road lined with palms. Calls to prayer issued from mosques, and pass- ersby glared at the soldiers. About ten kilometres down the road, Blickhahn's lead Humvee went around an S-shaped double bend, losing sight of the Hum- vee behind. Sweetness, his head and torso protruding from the roof beside a huge .50-calibre machine gun, was knocked over by a tremendous blast; he thought his Humvee had been hit. Be- hind him, though, he could see a cloud rising fast from the date palms. Explo- sives alone make white smoke; this was oily black, and swirling with debris. Blickhahn jumped out and ran back down the road. Guerrillas often follow mine blasts with small-arms fire and R.EG.s, so he fired his rifle randomly in every direction as he ran. Blickhahn's driver, meanwhile, jerked the Humvee through a feverish five-point turn and caught up with Blickhahn at the bend. All they found of the second, up-armored Humvee was a smoky hole in the pave- ment, and, lying nearb one door, as thick and heavy as the door of an office safe. The rest of the vehicle had flown across the highway and landed in a deep ditch. The air reeked of explosives and die- sel fuel From where Blickhahn and his driver stood on the road, the thick armor of the Humvee's passenger side looked like shredded cardboard. Blickhahn had never lost a soldier in combat, but before he even climbed down into the ditch he could see that Seiden had ab- sorbed the bulk of the blast and was dead. The two soldiers from the driver's side were alive but badly wounded. One of them, wounded in the throat, was gurgling, "Help me." Bang, who had been behind Seiden, was nowhere to be seen. Blickhahn expected to be attacked at any moment. "We were waiting for the Chinese to come over the wall" is how he remembers it. From the roof of the un- damaged Humvee, Sweetness was firIng the .50-calibre machine gun wildly, pouring streams of one-ounce bullets into ditches, garden walls, bushes-any- where attackers might have been hiding. This was his third ambush; he didn't worry about killing innocents, because he assumed that every civilian in this part of Baghdad had known about the attack ahead of time and stayed awa Blickhahn, focussed on the casualties, was so distraught that when he radioed for a medevac helicopter he couldn't fig- ure out which six-digit map coördinate to give. Two helicopters took off anyway and headed in his general direction. Blickhahn was eventually able to radio the helicopters the right coördinates; within ten minutes, they had landed be- side the road. The company's first ser- geant, Brett Robinson, monitoring radio traffic at the refinery, heard Blickhahn's call for medevac. He came roaring in with the 2nd Platoon and set up a pe- rimeter to repel attacks. One of the in- jured soldiers was stuck under the Hum- vee and unconscious, and the helicopter medics, nervous about a further attack, wanted to amputate his leg to free him. Amid the roar of the helicopters, the Bravo Company soldiers ended up in a shouting match with the Air Force med- ics; they almost came to blows before another Humvee managed to winch the wrecked vehicle. The soldier's leg, as it turned out, was buried in soft mud and barely hurt. Blickhahn and another soldier found a wire in the six-foot crater left by the